In the example below preferred-installdist option will be use and a specific GitHub token will be use for authentication with the domain github.com

Edit your vendor dependencies directly

For practical reasons, you may prefer cloning sources instead of downloading packages. For instance, this can be useful to edit a library directly in the vendor directory to test the behaviour of your application with that change. The --prefer-source option will force cloning sources instead of downloading an archive:

$ composer update me/repo --prefer-source

Then to see modified files in your vendor:

$ composer status -v
You have changes in the following dependencies:
/path/to/app/vendor/me/repo/Laravel/Request:
M Request.php

Composer will also tells you when you try to update a vendor that has been modified, and asks if you want to discard the changes: